Welcome to the Aurosphere

Who knew being a geek was so exciting?

2008-05-09T23:07:57Z

There's a crime caper movie out now, based on a true story, about MIT students.

Fruit Crisp makes writing papers less stressful. Or at least that's my theory.

2008-05-09T17:44:05Z

And also my excuse for spending an hour or so making it, rather than writing.

Recipe derived from the most recent edition of the Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook.

Filling:

5 cups of sliced fruit: apples, pears, peaches, apricots, whatever. If using any type of frozen fruit, thaw, but don't drain.
zest from two small lemons or one medium-to-large one; orange zest would work fine too
2 to 3 tablespoons granulated sugar. If using blueberries, increase to 4 tablespoons. For tart cherries, increase to 1/2 cup. For rhubarb, increase to 3/4 cup. For blueberries, cherries, rhubarb, or strawberries, also mix 3 tablespoons of all-purpose flour with the sugar.

Combine filling ingredients in a shallow two-quart baking dish.

Pre-heat oven to 375°F.

Topping:

1/2 cup rolled oats
1/2 cup (packed, not loose) brown sugar
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
spices, to taste; the recipe suggested 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, which is way too little spice; I probably used about 1.5 teaspoons of spice total, mixing allspice, cardamom cinnamon, clove, ginger, and nutmeg; for some fruits, tossing the fruit with a bit of vanilla extract before adding the sugar (and flour, if appropiate) might work well
1/4 cup butter (half a standard stick) cut into small cubes (I cut it 4x4x4, and that worked well)
1/4 cup chopped nuts and/or shredded unsweetened fresh coconut

In a large bowl, combine oats, brown sugar, flour, spices. Add butter and mix til you get coarse crumbs. The easiest way to get the right texture for crisp topping is to clean and dry your hands, and then pinch bits of the dry mix around the cubes of butter. Keep doing that as long as you can see identifiable bits of butter, then add the nuts and/or coconut and squish everything around a bit more. It helps if you have a friend who can scrape topping bits off your fingers with the back of a knife, when you're done.

Sprinkle topping evenly over filling.

Place baking dish in oven. I suggest putting the baking dish on top of another dish (say, a cookie sheet), so that if fruit juices bubble over they won't make a mess in the bottom of your oven.

Bake for 30-35 minutes (40 if fruit started out frozen), til topping begins to brown.

What I actually made last night was strawberry-rhubarb -- two pints of strawberries from the farmshare and three stalks of rhubarb from a friend's garden. Tasty for breakfast, topped with yogurt.

AB 2944: the California Business Leadership and Innovation Statute

2008-04-23T18:37:45Z

AB 2944, a bill written by Assemblyman Mark Leno (D - San Francisco) in collaboration with B Labs, would explicitly give permission to officers of corporations formed in California to consider, in their planning, other interests besides short-term financial benefit to shareholders. This would include considering harms to employees, communities and the environment, and the long-term interests of the company. This type of protection has already been extended to financial trustees, such as the managers of pension funds, partly in recognition of the fact that those funds that were considering issues other than short-term return were actually performing better anyways.

The bill is currently before the Assembly Judiciary Committee. The New Voice of Business (an aspiring competitor to the Chamber of Commerce, seeking to represent the true long-term interests of business owners) has a page about this bill, with some downloadable form-letters to send to the committee members.

If you're in Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, or Los Angeles county, you can visit GuideToGov.org to find all of your elected officials, to see if you're in one of the targeted districts. (The districts are all gerrymandered to pieces, so the below info is only approximate -- virtually every significant city in the state is carved up to have pieces in more than one district.) If you suspect you might be in somebody's district, you might try this page to get a detailed map of the relevant district. (Google the person's name with "assembly" and you'll find their district number.) Alternately, try googling "whatever county registrar" to find your registrar of voters, and then look for a link that will tell you info on your districts and representatives. Most registrars do have something like that.

The targets for these letters are:

Dave Jones from central Sacramento.

Van Tran, from an area that runs from Garden Grove to Costa Mesa.

Mark Leno, from San Francisco (for whom you should edit the letter to recognize that he's the author; he should be complimented/congratulated, rather than encouraged to support -- he obviously already does support his own bill).

Anthony Adams, Claremont.

Noreen Evans, Napa.

Mike Feuer, Beverly Hills.

Rick Keene, northeast CA (Lassen, Plumas, Butte, Sierra, Nevada, and Yuba counties).

Paul Krekorian, Glendale.

John Laird, Santa Cruz and Monterey.

Lloyd Levine, NW Los Angeles (Northridge, Van Nuys, etc).

Sally Lieber, South Bay (Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Alviso).

If you have friends in the targeted districts, please forward the New Voice link to them, and have them send just the letter for their Assemblyperson. (I frankly consider sending a letter to somebody who isn't your representative a waste of time, and of paper if you fax or print. I think NVoB is making a mistake in suggesting that folks hit every member, even if they're from out-of-district. I told the director that last Saturday, but if that's what they're gonna do, that's what they're gonna do. *shrug*)

I'd guess, knowing reputations, that Evans, Laird, and Lieber will already be standing with Leno. The other Dems (Jones, Feuer, Krekorian, Levine) should be particularly targeted. It's virtually certain the Repubs will vote against. (Bear in mind that in the entire legislature, only one Republican, Shirley Horton of San Diego, voted for AB 32, despite polls showing that a majority of registered Republicans supported it. I know plenty of nice Republicans, none of whom hold any elected office in government or in their party structure. The GOPsters in the Leg are basically crazy; we really need to encourage more moderate Republicans to vote in primaries...)

Do you live in a building?

2008-04-04T19:06:06Z

If so, you pay property tax, either directly as an owner or as part of your rent.

Property taxes, properly structured, could be an incredibly powerful tool for driving smart growth, "new urbanist" human-friendly communities, preservation of habitats, and so on. Property taxes as currently structured are a) incredibly unfair, b) create a substantial "tax on moving", and c) favor sprawl over dense "urban village" development. And yet, there were some pretty big problems with the system we had before, which drove the epochal Proposition 13 reform, which gave us the system we have today.

Want to learn more about this important issue? On April 10th, the Peninsula Democratic Coalition, San Mateo and Silicon Valley Chapters of Democracy for America, and the Palo Alto Branch of the American Association of University Women, are all co-hosting a panel discussion and Q/A session with four of our state's top experts on this issue -- an event that is the fruition of an idea I had early last year, and did a fair bit of work to organize.

Panelists include:
Assemblyman John Laird, Chair of the Committee on Budget
Lenny Goldberg, Executive Director of California Tax Reform Association
Larry Stone, Assessor of Santa Clara County

Moderated by Joseph Bankman, Ralph M. Parsons Professor of Law and Business at Stanford Law School

When: Thursday, April 10, 2008 at 7 p.m. (with light refreshments provided at 6:30 p.m.)

Where: Mountain View City Council Chambers, Mountain View City Hall (500 Castro Street)

Convenient parking is available free of charge in the Mountain View Civic Center garage located directly under the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts. The entrance to the garage is on Mercy Street. The "City Hall" elevator in the garage goes directly to the outer lobby of the Council Chambers on the second floor of City Hall. For those taking public transit, the 22 and 522 stop a couple blocks west at El Camino and Castro, and dozens of different buses, not to mention the CalTrain and VTA light rail, come through the downtown MtV CalTrain depot, which is about five blocks east of City Hall.

Come learn about abstract legal concepts, and why they have a major impact on the kind of town you live in! It'll be fun, and it'll make you a more informed voter when, some time in the next decade, we finally get a proposition on the ballot to reform our screwed-up property tax system.

Convention highlight...

2008-03-30T22:22:42Z

I amended one word of the CA Democratic Platform -- changed support for net zero energy buildings to net zero emissions (because the former is simply not feasible on all sites, and the latter emphasizes the real goal of addressing climate change and allows for investment in off-site renewables and various kinds of carbon offset to count).

ETA: Another highlight moment was on Sunday morning, when, slightly sleep deprived, I was approached by a guy who's making a documentary about the difference between conservative and progressive/liberal values. After rambling a bit, I came up with a line that I think was pretty good. I'd basically been saying that I really believe the rank-and-file conservative is a well-meaning person; I know the woman who I used to work with at the polls in College Terrace was extremely nice, the sort of person you'd trust to house-sit, or you'd tell the kids to go find if they get locked out of the house and you're not home... These folks like the way things are, or were when they grew up, or have a generally idyllic vision of a lost past -- maybe it's their parents' generation. In any case, they don't like to be pushed out of their comfort zone by anything new and different, and that includes people who don't seem to be like them. Whereas for progressives, other-ness isn't a problem; we're all us, we're just different kinds of us. We annoy everyone with our calls for recycling, because we see that you can't throw stuff away -- there's no such place (unless we're talking about lobbing things into the nearest star), the whole world is here. Anyways, I was riffing on this general topic when I got to a really good encapsulation: Conservatives see that the world is full of dragons, and call out for kings to protect them and walls they can hide behind; progressives say, "Hey, flying reptiles. Coooool! You think they'd come play with us?"

Extremely Funny Economics Paper

2008-03-23T02:59:17Z

The Theory of Interstellar Trade, by Paul Krugman, back when he was a young Assistant Professor. Samples...

From the abstract: "A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved."

From the introductory segment: "It should be noted that, while the subject of this paper is silly, the analysis actually does make sense. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."

And it gets better from there.

Quantitative News List

2008-03-12T18:58:56Z

My friend Kai -- fellow Peninsula Democratic Coalition boardmember, and recently-ascended president of the Peninsula Young Dems -- is starting up a mailing list that is currently being referred to as "quanty kids":

I'm starting a small email list for quantitatively-inclined people who follow news and politics. Basically the idea is that:

- Most channels of news information are terrible at conveying quantitative information, without which there are a lot of things you just can't understand.

- There exists a group of people that from time to time really want to understand an issue in the news, badly enough that they will go back and make sense of the coverage by generating themselves the quantitative information that was previously edited out.

- If you take a group of ~30 such people, who each once a month or so would anyway spend a couple hours trying to figure out the chinese air quality standards, or how the falling satellite compares to an ICBM, or what the actual difference between Obama and Clinton's healthcare plan is, or where the subprime money went, or whatever else -- you have an average of one "numbers note" every day or every other day.

- These people will see value added both in (i) having a group of quantitatively inclined people to run their own work by and share it with, and (ii) getting these random emails about "hey, here's what's actually going on in that news issue" shared with them so they have a better understanding of what's actually going on.

Incidentally, related to the topic, below is the draft of my column for this week about how crappy the MSM has done a job of covering the primaries.

Are you interested in being on the list? Do you have pals you think might?

Are any of the geeks on my f-list interested in this?

Here's the column he mentioned:

News Without Numbers

In the coverage of the Democratic primary, have you noticed the phrase "a complex mathematical formula" -- as in the sentence "it looks like Hillary Clinton is going to win Texas, but the delegates are allocated by a complex mathematical formula..."?

Let's unpack this statement for a moment. A "formula" is an abstract or symbolic rule that you can apply to various situations. OK, so we know they are going going to use a rule to allocate the delegates, they're not just going to do it on the fly. So far, so good.

Next step: if you're going to assign a number of delegates to one candidate, and another number of delegates to another candidate, you're using numbers, so yeah, the formula is probably going to be "mathematical". You're not going to use a "chemical formula," for example, to allocate the delegates. At the risk of stating the obvious, there is nothing that is not a "rule involving numbers" that they could possibly use to assign the delegates.

So the only thing left is "complex" -- in other words, the rule involving numbers is complicated. "Complex" doesn't tell us what the content of the rule is, it tells us a characteristic of that rule, a rule we still don't know.

Incidentally, content of the "complex" rule was typically this: in a given congressional district you get the percentage of the delegates closest to the percentage of the votes you got in that district. So assume there's four delegates. If you get 50% of the vote, you get two of the four; if you get 75% you get three of the four; and you switch from getting two to getting three at the halfway point -- 67.5% of the vote. Some congressional districts get more delegates than others because some have more Democrats in them, or more Democratic voters; and in some states it's by county or by state legislature district rather than by congressional district.

So the formula isn't that "complex" at all. In fact, bloggers one or two years out of college mostly managed to figure it out pretty well -- the Burnt Orange Report, a blog, had Texas primary delegate projections that were accurate to about three percent a week ahead of the contest, for example. They also put up a map of the districts and how many delegates there were in each so you could get a sense of how they arrived at these projections.

Meanwhile, the "best political team on TV" was projecting who would win the statewide popular vote in Texas a week later, after the voting was already over. Not only were they late, but they were talking about a number that only matters because the journalists choose to report that, instead of the number that does matter. It's surreal. And then, after reporting the wrong number, they explain that what they just said has something to do with the right number, but the relationship is "complex." They managed to talk for literally hours about stuff that didn't matter while conveying almost none of the information that did matter. And a week earlier, a kid two years out of college had showed them up.

I don't believe that CNN's team of experts are literally unable to make sense of the process. It's more the case that they don't bother to, because they assume we don't care -- we'd rather listen to discredited has-beens like Ralph Reed argue over who has the "momentum."

Things like a baseball have momentum. Elections have facts.

Perhaps it's the untold story of the 2008 election that typically amateur journalists communicating online have done better reporting than the most important news outlets in America. That wouldn't be new.

Think about this: do you remember the subprime mortgage scandal -- how "complex deals" turned sour? Do you have any idea what these "complex deals" were -- or how "a flavor you perceive with the sides of your tongue" relates to "the process of either selling an asset on short notice or drumming up more money to set aside as the collateral for a loan whose credit rating just got downgraded"? Doesn't that relationship seem worth reporting? Or of the billions of dollars were lost, whose billions of dollars they were, and where they went?

Or how about this one: Chinese "Blue Sky" air quality standards are 250 micrograms of particulate matter per cubic meter, and they try to get there 245 days a year, or about two thirds of the time. In contrast, the United States EPA standards are 150 micrograms per cubic meter, and they are not to be exceeded more than once a year. In other words, one in three days in Beijing the air is 70% percent more polluted than an American city is allowed to be one day a year. Remember the extensive New York Times piece on the topic? The 2500-word article on pollution levels never once used the word "gram", the unit which is used to measure pollution levels. That's embarrassing. Not one in two thousand five hundred words.

There are a lot of things you can't understand without numbers -- how delegates are allocated, where the subprime mortgage money went, or how Beijing's air quality compares to international standards, for example. Email me if you'd like to help me do something about this. I'm in the very initial stages of starting a "Numbers in the News" project with a couple buddies.

ph34r my 1337 sk1LL5!

2008-03-10T20:41:57Z

I have a new printer -- one of those all-in-one scan/fax/copy/whatever devices, the HP L7680. I tried to set it up yesterday and it failed. It made unpleasant grinding noises, and reported a paper jam even though there was no paper in it. Had to give up to go meet with some classmates, but got back to it this morning, with an online chat with a technician.

After trying a few things (simple stuff like power cycling), and staring intently for a while at the part of the printer that was making the bad noises, I realized what the problem was. There was a printhead plug stuck in one of the moving parts of the printer -- exactly the same orange rubber plug that had been included to protect the ink inlets on the two inkjet cartridges (CM and YK) included in the printer box, sealed in separate packets. I checked my trash, and sure enough, both those plugs were in the basket -- so I'm not the one who dropped the plug in there. This looks like a quality-control problem at the HP assembly plant. Maybe they test the cartridges (most of which are remanufactured these days, not new) right before packing them in the box with the printer, and they dropped a plug when doing that and thought they'd lost it on the floor, but instead they lost it inside my printer...

Since the machine had already tried to start up, and parts had moved around, the plug had gotten pretty badly wedged into the spot where it was sitting, but after a few minutes of effort with long tweezers, I was able to dislodge it; a few more minutes effort and I actually snuck it past the various parts in the way and got it out. And now my printer works. I made a color copy of the cover of Girl Genius (lots of fiddly details to compare). It looks great.

I gave the tech the serial number of the machine. I hope they'll adhere to good Total Quality Management practices and actually send a report to the manager of the relevant assembly and packing plant...

Perverse subsidies (and fines).

2008-03-01T22:23:22Z

There's an Op-Ed in today's NYT by a farmer who works famers' markets and supplies a Community Supported Agriculture program, who got hammered by fines from the Dep't of Agriculture for transitioning some acres designated for industrial monoculture corn, into producing fruits and vegetables for local consumption.

This is completely insane. I'm mailing my Congresscritters a link to the article and a short description, and a number of reasons why sustainable local farming is superior (e.g. it creates long-term work, rather than for seasonal migrant labor, and is thus better for the local economy -- it builds a stable community).

Life imitates art...

2008-02-27T23:44:35Z

Y'know, it's been long enough since West Wing that it hadn't occurred to me to make this comparison. But apparently Matt Santos was modeled on Obama, and some of his speeches actually contain input from Obama's writer, David Axelrod.

Here's hoping life continues to imitate art. After all, Santos won...

Taxes and FAFSA complete.

2008-02-24T06:07:01Z

And it only took me the whole damn day.

Professor Lessig goes to Washington?

2008-02-21T20:46:08Z

Lawrence Lessig, esteemed Stanford professor, expert on copyright and freedom of expression, and progressive thinker, has started exploring the possibility of running against Jackie Speier for the Congressional seat opened by the death of Tom Lantos, on a platform focused entirely on reforming the system by which we fund politics.

Personally, I suspect Jackie will disarm this by simply taking the pledge he has proposed; she did in the past take money from insurers, but I suspect the ability of popular politicians to fundraise from individuals, in small amounts, has evolved to the point that she will be able to get by without PACs and corporate officers. Still, it'd be interesting having Lessig in the conversation.

Girl gets bestest gifts.

2008-02-13T02:20:00Z

Christa just came home with an entire container of parmesan rinds, just the outer centimeter of the wheel, which I guess they cut off before grating the rest. That's the best part -- it's drier, which concentrates the flavor. And I am exceedingly pleased that girl remembers I like them. *love* :-)

We now have an estimate on the number of voters disenfranchised in Los Angeles: 94,500

2008-02-08T10:18:08Z

See the Sacramento Bee's editorial page:

A major voting disaster Tuesday shows the pitfalls of having each of the state's 58 counties set its own rules and ballot designs. Voters in Los Angeles County who belong to no party ("decline-to-state" voters) and who wanted to vote in the Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday got a raw deal.

Where most counties simply give nonpartisan voters a party ballot at their request, Los Angeles County gives nonpartisan voters a separate ballot that requires voters to fill out a bubble for the presidential candidate of their choice – and a second bubble for a political party.

Many voters do not see and do not fill out the second bubble – and, thus, their votes do not count.

The scale of disenfranchisement is huge – 94,500 of 189,000 decline-to-state votes. That's half of the nonpartisan ballots. By comparison, in the infamous Florida "butterfly ballot" debacle in the 2000 presidential election, 19,120 Palm Beach County ballots went uncounted because of the bad ballot design.

The same number is reported by the SFChronicle, and it lines up nicely with my own guess yesterday, based on the fact that only 10% of the votes in the Dem presidential race came from DTS voters, when registration figures suggest that they should've been at least 20% of the votes. (At my own precinct, they were closer to 30%.)

There were also statewide issues with poorly-educated pollworkers either forcing DTS voters to vote provisionally, or turning them away entirely. And the system-wide problems with absentee DTS voters getting the NP ballot (with some of them submitting that ballot, not realizing that the proper procedure would be to surrender it at a polling station in order to vote there; if they submitted the NP ballot and then tried to separately vote at a polling station, unable to surrender their NP ballot, they'd have to vote provisionally, and the provisional would almost certainly be rejected).

My guess is that all of this tallied up would not overcome the difference between Obama and Hillary on the popular vote across CA. However, it would be enough to overcome the difference between their popular vote nationwide on Super Tuesday (which appears to have been under 100k -- the exact number depends on what source you look at and how many votes had been tallied when they reported; Time says it was around 50k, and I think I remember hearing 85k on the radio) and would be enough to shift the delegate count in CA towards Obama by a substantial number -- enough to mean that Obama won significantly more delegates on Super Tuesday than Hillary did. (He may've already just barely won more, but the exact count is still in flux as assorted caucus math is worked out.)

Courage Campaign is running a petition to the LA registrar to count NP votes in the Dem race, even if they failed to fill in the double bubble. After Florida, and after Donna Frye losing in San Diego because some GOP judge felt that writeins for "Donna Fry" weren't clearly enough for her, I'm sick of seeing elections tainted by systems that refuse to count votes where the voter's intent is dead obvious. We need to not only count all the votes in this race, we need a fracking Federal Constitutional Amendment guaranteeing the right of the voter to have their vote counted as long as the intention is clear, even if it doesn't conform to the exact procedure implemented by lazy, incompetent, or malicious registrars (I'm looking at you, L.A., and at Theresa LePore of Palm Beach) and Secretaries of State (Ken Blackwell and Katherine Harris).

ETA: OK, so I realized I should think through a little more math. I'm having trouble finding detailed exit polling covering the breakdown of DTS vs Dem Party votes in the CA primary, but the numbers I could find (pre-election polling and info on races in other states) says Obama was losing to Clinton among Dems by about 5 points, but winning among DTS voters by 9. If you figure there are a few votes for minor candidates, then we might see the 94k votes break out to 50 for Obama and 40 for Clinton, for a net move of +10k to Obama. Which is probably only enough to shift about two delegates, though the details would depend on where the votes were in LA, and how close particular congressional districts were to the point at which a delegate changes hands.

ETA: Actually, according to this, nationwide results had Obama up 20 points among independents. So that would mean moving his total about +20k, out of a pool of a million, which is about two percentage points... Maybe 3-4 delegates transferred. And if it's Obama up four, Clinton down four, that would put them tied for elected delegates -- the last AP count I saw had them separated by eight.

Sustainable restaurant...

2008-02-07T16:48:03Z

Tinderbox is run by a friend of a Presidian, and is offering "SLOW" (seasonal, local, organic, whole) produce and meats. The menu looks very good. And they have an extensive bonus point schedule on OpenTable.com. (The 1000-point reservation basically means you effectively get a $10 discount -- every 2000 points gets you a $20 gift certificate good at any OT restaurant.) I will have to find a reason to get over there, some time in the next few months...

Something does not add up here.

2008-02-07T02:23:28Z

If you have not yet heard about the Los Angeles double bubble, it's sort of a reincarnation of the butterfly ballot -- it was a needlessly confusing ballot structure that may have cost a lot of people their votes. In order for voters registered as non-partisan / decline-to-state to vote in the Dem race, they had to make two marks in the presidential section of their ballot (as opposed to the butterfly, where it looked like maybe you needed two marks, but actually you needed to not make the second mark).

It would appear that in the LA presidential returns, there are over a million votes split between Obama and Clinton. And yet, if you look at the numbers for Non-Partisan Voters who cast a Partisan Ballot, you'll find that less than 100k people successfully got counted in the Dem presidential race -- that's less than 10% of the ballots. N-Ps are ~20% of all registrants, and the only major primary they could vote in was Dem. (I think Dems are around 40%, so if all N-Ps voted in the Dem primary, they'd be a third of the voters in that race, not 10%. And at our polling station, that one-third figure is about right.)

We need competent registrars. And we need to support Debra Bowen in setting statewide standards for elections.

Propositions

2008-01-31T23:47:37Z

After some further research, I've come down leaning strongly to No on 92. PeteRates.com gives a pretty nasty review to that proposition, and as far as I can tell he's correct about the structure of the funding mechanism. He also has an excellent rundown on why we should oppose 94-97 (which I was already planning to do). I've written extensively before about my support of 93. (91 is orphaned -- the people who submitted it decided they didn't want it to pass after all.)

An interesting fiscal policy idea...

2008-01-29T21:00:43Z

Andrew Samwick, a quite conservative (but sane) economist, has suggested that the federal gov't should start planning out its infrastructure capital investment over a period of several years, much as it already does for large defense purchases. (Big defense purchases, like naval vessels, are paid for over a period of several years; IIRC the defense budget can schedule expenses as far out as four years from the fiscal year officially being planned for.) Then it could easily empower a fiscal agency similar to the Federal Reserve to tweak the scheduling of those projects, creating instant hiring (boost aggregate demand) with the benefit of investment in infrastructure (boost aggregate supply) to provide economic stimulus when needed, without the kind of delays and policy arguments we're seeing currently. The agency could also force delays when the economy was already booming, both to help bring the budget into balance, and to help prevent inflation and the kind of "overheating" that allows money to flow into asset bubbles.

It's an interesting thought. And, it turns out, something just a little bit like it has been proposed by Senators Dodd (D-CT) and Hagel (R-NE). Their version is a federal infrastructure bank, which would essentially use monetary policy to influence fiscal policy, by infusing money into infrastructure projects (increasing gov't debt to spend on the infrastructure and associated jobs -- just like directly buying the projects would) when the economy looked like it could use a boost.

I'm still not certain whether I'll vote Edwards or Obama...

2008-01-29T07:52:43Z

...because I have a tiny sliver of hope that Edwards could accumulate enough delegates to play kingmaker for Obama and extract some promises to break out of right-wing frames and push truly progressive policy (or at least to appoint Edwards to some influential cabinet post -- say, SecLabor, where he could turn around the NLRB so it starts being a neutral arbiter instead of a tool of union-busting corporocrats). Nonetheless, this is a kickass analysis of the SC primary, telling off some of the pundits and prog-bloggers (many of whom I like) for dismissing Obama's SC win. Gacked from mickle.

Unrelatedly, Xta and I now live together. Moving is a lot of work, and distracts me from my classes. I need to do my entire Operations HW tomorrow, which I really should've started on about four days ago. Also should try to get through at least half the Macro HW tomorrow. And prep for a telecon on Thu concerning BizGov.

And I also want to find time to write an endorsements post on the Props. Short version is: 92 on community colleges leaning Yes but not fully decided; 93 on term limits definitely yes (google "site:auros.livejournal.com term limits" to find the post with details); 94-97 on Indian gambling, leaning pretty strongly no, because an expert I trust (Lenny Goldberg from Cal Tax Reform) is one of the authors of the argument against, saying that there is no adequate auditing of the revenues the new compacts will bring in, so even if you're OK with the gambling and with the way the compacts discriminate among tribes (to the potential detriment of many), the compacts are not guaranteed to actually provide real long-term benefit to the state.

PS: Kathleen Sebelius (link is to her delivery of the official Dem response to the Bush SotU) is my personal choice for first woman president. She does a highly effective job of making the case that mainstream Democratic policy is the center, and insofar as the GOP stands in the way of it, we're not talking about two opposing sides, with the "center" in between, we're talking about one party behaving in a sane and responsible manner, while the other ignores the wishes of even a significant chunk of its own electorate. (e.g. Upwards of half of Californians registered Republican believe that global warming is a serious issue and support Arnold's signing of AB32; meanwhile, there were basically no Republican votes for AB32 in the leg, and the executive board of the CA GOP has publicly insulted their Governor.)

ETA: Edwards has quit, so I'm voting Obama.

Best economic stimulus proposal ever.

2008-01-25T03:48:28Z

From Len Burman, director of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, in the NYTimes.

[I]f they were repealed in a year [note that this means moving the sunset date a year earlier than currently scheduled], the Bush tax cuts could spur a burst of economic activity in 2008. If people knew that their tax rates were going up next year, they'd work to make sure that more of their income is taxed at this year's lower rates. Investors would likewise have a giant incentive to cash out their capital gains now to avoid paying higher taxes later. In 1986, stock sales doubled as taxpayers rushed to avoid the capital gains tax rate increase scheduled for 1987. If people pour their stock gains into yachts and fast cars, that's pure fiscal stimulus.

The money involved could be considerable. Capital gains in 2007 were something like $700 billion, representing well over $1 trillion in asset sales. It looks as if gains will be much lower in 2008, but a looming tax increase could easily spur an additional $500 billion in sales. If only 20 percent of that translated into extra spending, we'd have as much or more short-term stimulus as we could get from the package Congress and the president are considering.

Best of all, this is one stimulus proposal that would reduce the deficit -- the single largest threat to the economy's long-term health. And that long-term benefit wouldn't depend on our getting the timing and amount of stimulus right, something policymakers are notoriously inept at.

Anyone remember this story?

2008-01-20T23:35:27Z

There's a sci-fi story in which, after almost losing a war with a considerably more powerful alien species, and then managing to seize control of that species' huge terraforming engine and turn it against them, humans have gone on to terraform some more colonies and continue developing their capabilities. The story takes place on a station that's trying to produce wormholes, using tiny artificial black holes (which in some way stabilize the wormhole mouths). Every time they get a mass to sink inside its Chandrasekhar limit, it vanishes down the wormhole without coming out again like it should. They eventually figure out that it's actually being sucked into another universe -- a parasite. The ending of the story basically says: humans have gone from biological evolution, to cultural evolution, to being the agent perpetuating biospheric evolution (taking the entire set of ecosystems of Earth and perpetuating it, in mutated/adapted/localized forms, through terraforming), and has now discovered that entire universes may be engaged in evolution -- and if there are parasites, there might be predators out there...

I'm trying to remember the title / author / where this was published. I'm thinking it might've been a short story or novella in Analog... Anyone know that one?

I'm in the news...

2008-01-20T16:55:13Z

The Palo Alto Weekly, to be precise.

I would've spoken with the author by phone, but I was in class all day, so I composed an email over lunch hour...

The Fact-Checking Department strikes again...

2008-01-15T23:04:57Z

Some of you may recall that I am Slate's Fact-Checking Department (though I kinda let them down from October through mid-December last fall when school got really intense; sigh). I'm debating whether to buy a wine fridge. At my current place, at the back of the garage there's a storage unit. The garage is below street level, so the storage unit is effectively an underground room; it stays at a very constant temperature. At the new place, we won't have that, so I thought perhaps a dedicated fridge was in order. Looking at stuff on Froogle, I came up with one listed for a rather improbable price. An amusing email exchange followed:

> On Tue, 15 Jan 2008, R.M. 'Auros' Harman wrote:
> I think the price on this item must be an error:
> http://www.appliancebestbuys.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=79309
>
> I don't think a 100+ bottle wine fridge would cost less than a hundred dollars...
> Though, let me hasten to add, I'll be happy to buy it from you at the listed $29 price. :)

Hello,

We do apologize for the error, there was a price mistake on that model.
We have deleted that item from our website since it is not available.
We apologize for any inconveniences.

Thank you,
Appliance Best Buys Customer Service Department

I thought as much. Still, it would've been awfully convenient if they'd decided to honor the price just once, since I caught it. But I guess they don't actually have any of the item anyhow...

Cirque de Soleil tix 2/5 8pm

2008-01-15T22:27:24Z

Xta checked and found that it is indeed possible to upgrade the student ticket to a regular one, you just have to show up a bit early. So if anyone was interested but wasn't taking them because of that, let me know...

Anybody want a bed?

2008-01-15T20:23:29Z

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/pen/fur/540097410.html

$700 or best offer, for a very nice Cal King, four poster, with all accessories... Feel free to fwd to anyone you know who's moving and buying furniture.